Lincoln: a Foreigner's QuestJan MorrisPenguin £7.99, pp224Buy it at BOL

When Jan Morris travelled around America back in the 1950s, Abraham Lincoln was everywhere. His sober image adorned advertising bill boards as well as legal tender. The frontier values supposedly represented by the sixteenth President, such as honest hard labour, the pioneering spirit, the triumph of the common man, were celebrated in both primary-school classes and in serious biographical studies. As it turned out, the power of Lincoln as an American icon was soon to wane, but Morris was both repulsed and intrigued by the nationalist cant.

For those, like me, who visited America for the first time in the late 1980s it would not be the hang-dog features of Lincoln greeting them at airports and bus terminals, but the Technicolor grin of Ronald Reagan. Hard to imagine an American hero less like Lincoln, or an era less concerned with the value of 'honest, hard labour', yet the country was still steeped in the same defensive self-congratulation.

In Morris's personal look at the Lincoln story, she tackles the foundations of the modern American dream with just this sort of scepticism. There is no gratuitous disrespect, but humorous and disruptive comment leaps from every page. Far from venerating the kind of wise and slow-speaking Midwesterner typified by Lincoln, Morris admits they are just the sort she would least like to find herself next to on a long-haul flight.

But in the end, Lincoln himself rises untarnished, stove-pipe hat intact, from all the hogwash that is talked about him. Morris can't help both liking and admiring him and she communicates this easily, as well as giving a true picture of his background, with her naughty, breezy style. After all, Lincoln's vision of America is important, even when the reality falls down on the promise.